The Unconscious

Contemporary Refractions In Psychoanalysis

Pascal Sauvayre, David Braucher, Pascal Sauvayre, David Braucher

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2020
• eBook ISBN: 9781000165289
• Topic: Medicine
• Subtopic: Psychiatry & Mental Health

This book explores the unconscious in psychoanalysisusing cross-disciplinary input from the cultural, social and linguistic perspectives. This book is the first contemporary collection applying the various perspectives from within the psychoanalytic discipline.

It covers the unconscious from three main perspectives: the metaphysical, including links with quantum mechanics and Jung's thought; the socio-relational, drawing on ideas from politics, inter-generational trauma and the interpersonal; and the linguistic, drawing on notions of the social construct of language and hermeneutics. Throughout the history of psychoanalysis, theorists have wrestled with the ubiquitousness and diverse nature of the unconscious. This collection is an account of the contemporary psychoanalytic struggle to understand and work with this quintessential, defining, and foundational object of psychoanalysis.

This book is primarily of interest to practicing clinicians and trainees. It is also of significant interest to any academic professionals and students who adapt psychoanalytic thought in their studies in the humanities, including literature, philosophy, and the social sciences.

Part I

The unconscious is everywhere, and nowhere

Chapter 1

From out of nowhere—The paradox of unconscious experience¹

Warren Wilner

Unique analyst that he was—and promulgating the concept of psychic uniqueness as he did—Ben Wolstein (1982) had many creative takes on theoretical and clinical psychoanalysis. But one idea that has passed relatively unnoticed (and, to my regret, I never asked him more about it while he was alive) was his frequent reference to the apparent paradox of unconscious experience. If something is unconscious, how can it be experienced? Wolstein considered such experience, should we find it to actually exist, to be private and not shareable.

I think of the unconscious much like the past is described in Jack Finney's delightful novel Time and Again (1970/1995): it’s always with us, its expressions always potentially present in awareness. We are kept in the conscious present, in part—according to Finney—by the environmental cues that reinforce for us being in this reality. As Wittgenstein has said, a picture holds us captive, and keeps repeating itself to us over and over again (as cited in Finch, 1977). Finney fancifully suggests that if these cues were to dramatically change, we could conceivably be catapulted by a kind of quantum leap back into a specific past or—as I in a loosely analogous way consider here—into an eternal unconscious present. Implicit in Finney's idea is that there is a link between the psychic and physical worlds. Here, I use the concept of unconscious experience in order to explore this idea.

My intention is to go beyond a characterization and description of a concept of unconscious experience, and to provide—through clinical and other life examples, as well as by psychoanalytic, philosophical, linguistic, and literary reference—fresh perspectives on what the nature and structure of unconscious experience might be. I also seek to explore a possible connection between the psychic and physical worlds to which Finney alludes in his novel. Fundamental to this study will be the distinction between experience and what is happening in the physical world, in reality. In order to establish a strong basis in the physical world for this comparison, I lean heavily on some fascinating findings and theories in physics that offer, by way of metaphor and possible direct correspondence, a model or graphic picture of what the dimension of unconscious experience may be, and what we might consider to be ‘the unconscious’ itself.

The unconscious is nowhere

Since time immemorial, we have tried to account for psychical phenomena that seem to come from out of nowhere. Wolstein (Personal Communication, 1975) said that he considered such phenomena to be emanations from the unconscious. He describes these as intrusions of the unconscious. In a different vein, Kabbalists talk about the Kabalistic god, the Ein Sof, which is not god the creator. Rather, the Kabalistic vision is of a hidden world that exists beneath a veil or cloud. God suddenly withdraws, revealing the world below (Matt, 2009). This world can refer to different things, but here I consider that it may also stand for an unconscious world, a world that exists in a different psychic dimension from the conscious one that we usually apprehend.

An effort to study an intrusion occurring in the physical world was carried out by the English physicist, David Deutch (1997). Deutch noticed the presence of shadows within some laboratory procedures that he believed could not be accounted for by the factors present in these experimental contexts. He then designed an experiment, using a single source of coherent light (such as a laser) that he projected in a completely blackened out room. He studied from different positions and angles how the light then appeared. He discovered that, in addition to all of the possible ways the beam of light could manifest itself, there still remained a shadow that seemed to come from out of nowhere. Deutch concluded that this shadow could only be emanating from a parallel universe.

Apropos of the title of this chapter, and from a linguistic standpoint (at least in the English language), I see the word, nowhere, as being conjoined through having the same spelling with the expression, now-here. Furthermore, I have come to think that there is a kind of experiential connectedness between nowhereness and now-hereness that is analogous to Einstein's concept of space-time as being a single dimension. This suggests that in undergoing the experience of nowhereness, in which one feels lost within the immediate surround, one may be in a literal state of now-hereness as well. However, the possible sense and vital presence that the experience of now-hereness affords is frequently lost, as one—in order to avoid the pain and disorientation of feeling lost in the world—often clings to familiar reference points. Despite its implication of affirming one's presence in the world, now-hereness may, in an abstract sense, also refer to the experience of the joining of pure time and space, or of what we may consider to be, nowness and hereness. Furthermore, the abstract form of this experience may leave one unable to experience, one's ‘isness,’ or one's own personal existence or being. Similarly, when impersonalized, nowhereness can also be seen as no-whereness, and conjure up the experience of not knowing if there is even a where where one could be. These ideas will be developed throughout this chapter.

A common psychoanalytic belief is that we are unable to get beyond our own subjectivity, that much—if not all—perception is interpretation (Greenberg, 1981). I believe that within unconscious experience there is no experiencing subject and no separate object that is being experienced. These two have merged along with the context in which such experience occurs. Therefore, unconscious experience would appear to exist beyond our subjectivity and may appear to us simply as a reality, yet a reality in which our presence or actions are experienced of a piece with what is happening. Furthermore, the separate experience of one's own self may not be able to occur consciously. The philosophers of the Self have averred that the experiencing eye—or perhaps the ‘I’—cannot experience itself in the act of the present event of seeing (Organ, 1968). Such experience may exist alongside of, or in a separate experiential dimension from, perspectivistic, subjectively based, and intersubjective conscious reality. In that reality, all or most perception is thought of as interpretive and relative. Perhaps unconscious experience may then be present in awareness, although not consciously so. Furthermore, there would be no room for personally generated distortion in unconscious experience: there is, once again, no longer the presence of a possible distorting subject and no separate object to be distorted.

Of great importance to the ‘present inquiry’—a favorite term of Wolstein's—is Einstein's discovery that time and space are relative to one another. They are, according to Einstein, not separate dimensions. Rather, there is a single space-time continuum that exists in addition to their nominal dimensional separateness. To be in the dimension of space is also to be in the dimension of time and vice versa. As Freud has said that the unconscious is timeless, the present may be considered timeless as well, since—in psychic life—there is always a timeless present without which the past and future would have nothing to stand in relation to.

The Italian physicist Carlo Rovelli (2017) claims that existence in the subatomic quantum world of infinitesimally small phenomena is relational and interactive. He asserts that things come into existence only because they are interactively related to other things. Thus, consciousness, having an experiential source and a separate object of this experience, is such an interaction and, therefore, apprehends ‘reality.’ It can also be said that past and future are conscious of the present, but the present—like a quantum wave that can stand alone—may be understood to be unconscious of them.

Since there is a gap between an experiencing subject and what she or he is experiencing, time, however minute the amount, would be required to experientially traverse this distance. The structure of consciousness and the act of being conscious may then be considered to create not only the reality of the dimension of time, but of the world as well. If we understand conscious experience to be conscious of what is outside of itself, then this same perspective might imply that each conscious act would also extend one’s world and, thereby, might further even create the very world that consciousness could then be conscious of, a possibility that will be later discussed in the section on quantum physics. However, unconscious experience—like the present tense—would not apprehend any such temporal interval. Nor would the world be stretched or extended by it since what in conscious experience would be apprehended as relative and—as a separate subject and object—would be experienced as already complete. An additional issue is the scope or dimensionality of what we might think of as the integral wholeness of unconscious experience, which might (depending upon the context) range from something very limited, to being as vast as the universe itself. Thus, physicists believe that the background radiation from the Big Bang (an event that occurred 13.8 billion years ago and took over 13 billion years to reach us, traveling at the speed of light, i.e., 186,000 miles per second), is still in our consciously experiential space-time present. The present may facetiously be said to be out of the dimension of time, but then it may never have had to be ‘in time’ to begin with, since the present—by definition—is already when events are happening. As we all originally derive from the Big Bang, and later by way of the substance of the stars, such substance may be present for us in some inchoate way as unconscious experience. This is alongside of the conscious observations and determinations that we can make about this gigantic cosmic event. Thus, the ‘snow’ we once saw on our television screens before the first programs of the day aired is thought by physicists to actually be a manifestation of background or microwave radiation from the Big Bang (Rosenblum and Kuttner, 2011).

Similar considerations apply to space. Since space exists between objects, consciousness would be required to experience these separate contextual aspects. Unconsciousness, because of its merged quality, would in a strict sense be unable to do this. So, when Freud said that the unconscious is timeless, he might have added that it is spaceless as well. This implies that the analytic concept of psychic space—and of course, movement within such space—can only take place consciously, thus subject to the structure that the consciously conceived laws of physics would impose, a condition crucial to ideas presented later in this chapter. In contrast, undergoing the experience of doing something as we are doing it, to be entirely in the present without awareness of ourselves as subject or to any objectified aspect of self, is to be undergoing unconscious experience.

Such was my own experience many years ago while climbing a high sand dune on a trip to the Sahara Desert in Morocco. Looking around when finally reaching the top, I suddenly felt bewildered, as I was faced by what was, for me, a featureless landscape that seemed to go on forever. I said, almost as though talking into the air (although in the presence of a companion who was now on top of the dune as well), that I felt I was in the middle of nowhere. She coyly replied, “Nowhere is spelled now-here.” Hence, the title of this chapter.

My initial conscious experience of a clear separation between myself and the dune as I approached it gradually gave way to a growing sense of my being an extension of the dune. I gradually became less aware of the dune and also of my own person as the one negotiating the climb. The dune became increasingly experienced by me to be as much a part of me as I was of it, as though we were becoming experientially one. This comes close to what I imagine as being unconscious experience: a kind of union between myself and the sand dune, which did not include a clear cognizance of my separate personal being, nor a knowing awareness of the surround. Here we have an example of a process of initially conscious experience gradually transforming into unconscious experience, as the awareness of self and otherness fades. This stands in sharp contrast to later illustrations of how unconscious experience may suddenly appear, seemingly from out of nowhere.

My feeling of bewilderment at the dune at least affirmed my presence—albeit uncomfortably so—with my later ascension into full consciousness, expedited by my comment and my companion's mind-expanding reply. This part of the experience brings to mind what Heidegger (1949) wrote about the experience of dread. He said that dread appears when everything that is familiar falls away from us, revealing nothing. Dread, he chillingly writes, reveals nothing! Since consciousness implies an aware relationship between self and an outside world (i.e., from a psychodynamic point of view occurring around personally problematic issues), unconscious may be to be literally un-conscious, which is to say, to remove traces of our own consciously problematic involvement in these issues. Here, one is ‘unconscious’ to what has been conscious experience (Wilner, 1999). Furthermore, as Rovelli (2017) has emphasized, in the quantum world—which I think applies to the unconscious realm—things do not exist as isolated entities. They first come into being and may continue to exist because of their interactive relationship to other things. What this may mean is that unconscious experience and ‘the unconscious’ may be constituted of dynamic and now merged relational events that are going on ‘presently,’ which is to say timelessly, ‘within it,’ rather than constituted, e.g., primarily of fixed, separate, and isolated feelings, memories, and wishes. Furthermore, as an expression of its relational nature, what may be present unconsciously would again include the now merged contexts in which these events take place. This appears to give unconscious experience a paradoxically dual nature. In having nothing that is external to it—like a particle in the particle/wave duality in physics—it seems uniquely singular, and, linguistically, best expressed through nouns. Yet, like the wave, it also has a kinetic and dynamic multifaceted relational aspect, which may be best conveyed by verb.

The merged nature of unconscious experience also loosely corresponds, both in my view and now on a cosmic scale, to what in physics might also be understood to be a singularity, or points of absolute density. Examples are the original globule of gas or matter of th...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Endorsements
• Half-Title
• Series
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• List of contributors
• Introduction
• PART I The unconscious is everywhere, and nowhere
• PART II Power and the social unconscious
• PART III Language, the sexual, and the unconscious
• Index